You are here

Pages

Tis' the season for impulse buying a lot of games and flitting between them like finicky bees looking for the perfect flower. In an effort to justify my impulse buys I am trying to stick with two single player games at a time so I'll actually get through them.

I can now say that I've finished Gears of War (coop with Gaald) and tonight I finished off Rainbow Six: Vegas in single player. I'm really close to wrapping up Neverwinter Nights 2, which will be just in time for my Wii component cables to arrive so I can tackle Zelda this weekend.

I don't know if you can "finish" Viva Pinata, but my garden is kicking rad now. I'm up to level 26.

How you doin'?

“We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people’s wrongness.”
~Pema Chödrön

Just got the thatgamecompany disk, with flow, journey and flower. Beat journey before but flow and flower we're new and good. Journey is still leagues better then either though. It also had some indie jam games on it, nothing great though.

The ending was ok. Despite having over 7k EMS it would appear I didn't get a great deal of the various scenes from the Extended Cut. Will probably look at the other endings in a few days.

Loved the trilogy.

Just on the off-chance, check that the Extended Cut DLC properly installed - I finished the game after thinking I'd properly installed it only to get no different cutscenes than originally, then checked and found that it hadn't installed. I've now done the red and green endings with the EC and you will definitely notice the difference.

The ending was ok. Despite having over 7k EMS it would appear I didn't get a great deal of the various scenes from the Extended Cut. Will probably look at the other endings in a few days.

Loved the trilogy.

Just on the off-chance, check that the Extended Cut DLC properly installed - I finished the game after thinking I'd properly installed it only to get no different cutscenes than originally, then checked and found that it hadn't installed. I've now done the red and green endings with the EC and you will definitely notice the difference.

Hmmm, I suspected something like this may have been the root of the problem. Gonna look online for how to check for this, but if you've got a quick guide for it I'd greatly appreciate it

***EDIT***

Nevermind that; it would appear that to get the extended cut going I have to replay the last couple of missions with the "legend" save made after beating the game.

Finally....finally beat Ni No Kuni! Holy crap what a long final battle, mostly due to the AI party not being able to defend and getting themselves killed. Overall I'm still glad I purchased the game, but after the initial Studio Ghibli shine wore off, the game seemed to decend into basic JRPG tropes and the combat was either extremely frustrating or extremely easy. The only problem is that I really knew how combat was going to go until I was already in battle and my party/abilities were locked in for the duration.

Far Cry 3 was barely beaten. Those checkpoints between sequences are brutal, aka terrible design. There are spectacular things in FC3, QTE knife battles aren't one of them. Did you learn nothing from your father, RE4? So incredibly disappointing how sloppy some decisions are in an otherwise noteworthy game.

"Duke Nukem Forever's switch from Quake II to Unreal technology took six weeks, but it will ultimately save months of development time."
@Holysh*tMatt

Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War which was much more slowly paced than I remember from the demo way back when. All in all a good game but I'm glad the focus shifted to small unit tactics in DoW2 as the base building and management aspect was not nearly as good as that of other RTS games.

Blah, I haven't finished a game in like three weeks. Ni No Kuni and Fire Emblem are both sitting at around 40 hours. If I don't finish both in February I will be a sad panda. I'd like to maybe knock out Pokemon Black 2 as well. Maybe an XBLA game to keep up a 4/month pace. Short month though!

I hate you. Three whole weeks?? I only finished one game in all of 2012!

Finally finished the main quest for Skyrim. Still heaps to do, but after 190 hours, I can officially say I've beaten Skyrim. Now to start a new character and do some different quests. There are more achievements to be had!

Also, this is my first completed game for the year. Can't believe it took me till the middle of February.

If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate. --Captain Zapp Brannigan

DmC
I think it's a great game. The game has a solid foundation on the character action game. I would place it above the God of War games in terms of its combat. It is pretty easy on the medium/hard difficulty. I beat the end boss

Spoiler:

Vergil

in one shot. The bosses are big but not very challenging. The spawn of

Spoiler:

Mundus

was the only semi tricky boss. The unlocked difficulty is better but not DmC 3 normal "hard". The story is... Silly. The girl is a very obvious plot device and the villain is comically evil. I would say its worth to play it. The environments are really cool.

I finished Art Style: Rotozoa on the Wii. The Art Style games were a series of five smaller, more experimental games made by Nintendo and published on WiiWare. They all have a similar minimalist aesthetic design and tight focus on a single gameplay mechanic.

Rotozoa has you controlling an amoeba-like creature with two to five differently colored arms. You swim around and touch little colored floating creatures. Hit them with an arm that's the same color as they are, and that arm grows; hit them with any other color, and the arm breaks off at the point of contact. The goal in each level is to grow all of your arms to a specific length. When an arm hits that length, it can't be broken, but you'll still lose life whenever it contacts a creature that's the wrong color.

There's a nice risk/reward built in because the longer arms are more unwieldy and more often than not get in the way while you're trying to pick up a different color. Also, I can't be certain, but I think the more of a single color you collect, the more creatures of that color spawn in, making it that much more difficult to collect all the colors you need for all of the arms. It's a neat, focused design that reminds me in a good way of something you might see in an old arcade cabinet.

The only problem with it is that it's short. Like, one hour to beat all the levels short. There are still challenge modes and the like, but the core progression from starting the game to seeing the credits roll took me one hour and nine minutes. I didn't mind that so much since it was a free game through Club Nintendo, but if I'd paid $6 for it, I might be more annoyed. I'm interested in the other games in the series, but I'll probably just keep an eye out for them in Club Nintendo for the time being.

Finally finished up Assassin's Creed 3 after stalling out on it for a while. One thing I really respect Ubisoft for with this series is how they're always introducing new ideas and ripping out old ones with each iteration of this series, impressive for something that's annualised. I really don't like all the choices they made this time though. The naval combat stuff was amazing but the trade caravan system was just too complicated and cumbersome. It also had probably one of the longest, slowest, most boring opens of any game I can think of and the ending basically didn't make any sense. There's actually a good game in the middle but I think that future iterations of this game need to be streamlined and really eliminate some of the boring side stuff. The entire Frontier part of this game must have taken immense development resources but it's just boring and not fun. Brotherhood's still far and away the best entry in the series.

Just Cause 2 which was fun but not something I'm going to 100%. If there had been more physical simulation of the destruction a la Red Faction: Guerilla I think it would have grabbed my attention and never let go. As it was moving, shooting, driving, and flying through the world were all great fun and had top notch effects attached to them. A beautiful little playground to blow up so much stuff.

Skyrim: Dawnguard which was uninspiring with the exception of a couple of cool new vistas in a game already packed with such views.

I downed Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (PS3) on Monday and Fire Emblem: Awakening (3DS) last night. Ni No Kuni has some issues but was good overall, and largely saved by its stellar soundtrack. Fire Emblem was nearly flawless, the best in the series by quite a long shot. More detailed impressions from me in the threads for each game.

I don't know if I should be proud that I finished both or depressed that I think I've put 110 hours into the two of them combined since January 28th.

Just Finished Sleepy Dogs. I found it to be a much more enjoyable experience than the GTA games, but I can't compare it to Saints Row as they are two very different games in the way you approach them.

I found as the game progressed the mechanics forced me down the path the story was trying to push Wei down. At the start I was very careful to obey traffic laws and not run over pedestrians or hit lights, etc. But as the game wore on I became more careless, pushing through the driving across town filler to get to the juicy story and martial arts fights.

NathanialG wrote:

I can only assume that when the antichrist arrives he will be left handed, Australian, and attempting to steal our womenfolk.

Finished up DmC Devil May Cry tonight. Helluva game, I recommend it to almost anyone. Unless you hate colors and fast-paced action.

Journey is up next, which will get me to my 4/month quota. Seems like cheating a little since it's supposed to be a two hour long game, but February cheated by being a short month and two of the games I beat are long.

Which I guess you know, because I said so two posts up. Beat more games, slackers!

Finished up The Room on the wife's ipad. Man, that game is amazing. Im not even a huge fan of ios games in general, but that is a game that uses the platform really well. Very tactile feel and a perfect fit for the ipad. Great ambience too. Very Lovecraftian.

I'm so glad that they're pushing a free update with another set of puzzles this summer.

Finished up The Room on the wife's ipad. Man, that game is amazing. Im not even a huge fan of ios games in general, but that is a game that uses the platform really well. Very tactile feel and a perfect fit for the ipad. Great ambience too. Very Lovecraftian.

I'm so glad that they're pushing a free update with another set of puzzles this summer.

Oooooh really? More puzzles you say? I really enjoyed that one, if this is true, I can't wait!